Chapter 9: What the Statement Became
The formal statement took three hours.
A detective named Solis sat across from me with a recorder between us and asked questions in the same flat, patient tone for the entire time, like someone who had learned that the best way to hear the truth was to make silence feel safe.
I told him everything from the beginning.
Week twenty-two.
The first time Daniel said the attic would be better for me, quieter, easier on my nerves.
The first time Patricia prepared the tube and told me to stop making things difficult.
The phone on the dresser.
The livestream.
The comments I had read upside down in the reflection of the window.
I told him about Dr.
Marsh.
The supplements I had stopped taking.
The notepad he always kept turned away.
I told him about the third voice.
Warren Gill.
I gave him every recording.
Solis listened to each one at least twice.
He didn't react to most of them.
But when he played the section where Patricia said *the agency already has a family lined up, they just need the paperwork signed within seventy-two hours of delivery*, he stopped the recording and wrote something down and didn't speak for almost a full minute.
"Is there anything else?" he said.
"The blood panel," I said.
"Dr.
Yuen ordered it.
I don't have the results yet."
"We'll request them directly from the hospital." He clicked his pen closed.
"Ms.—" He stopped.
Used my first name instead.
"You did something very difficult in a very small space with very few resources.
I want you to know that the documentation you've provided is—" He paused, choosing the word carefully.
"Thorough."
"I had time," I said.
He almost smiled.
"Yes."
The results from the blood panel came back that afternoon.
Dr.
Yuen sat on the edge of my bed and read them to me in the same narrating voice she'd used during the ultrasound.
The supplements had contained a sedative compound — low dose, cumulative.
Not enough to cause immediate harm.
Enough, over ten weeks, to make a person seem foggy.
Slow.
Difficult to believe.
"Unstable," I said.
"That would be one way to describe the symptoms," Dr.
Yuen said carefully.
"That's what he was going to say.
Daniel.
That I was unstable."
Dr.
Yuen looked at the results in her hand.
"The compound is documented now," she said.
"It's in your file.
It's in the report I've already sent to Detective Solis." She set the paper down.
"Dr.
Marsh's name is also in that report."
I thought about the gray cardigan.
The bag he always kept closed.
"He knew what he was giving me," I said.
"The dosage was consistent," Dr.
Yuen said.
"It didn't vary.
That's not an accident."
She left me with the report in my hand.
I read it twice.
Then I folded it and held it and thought about Patricia's voice saying *nobody will believe a word you say*, and I thought about how carefully they had built that.
The isolation.
The doctor.
The supplements.
The livestream designed to show a woman who looked unwell, who looked like she needed managing.
They had built a version of me that didn't exist.
And then I had recorded the people who built her.
Donna came by that evening.
She brought food from a place down the street — nothing special, a sandwich and a cup of soup — and she sat in the chair by the window and didn't ask me to talk.
After a while I said, "Why did you come back?
That second delivery.
You didn't have to."
Donna looked at the window.
"I saw your face the first time," she said.
"When I drove away, I kept thinking about it." She shrugged, a small movement.
"I've got a daughter.
She's thirty-one now.
But I kept thinking — if she were up in that room."
She didn't finish the sentence.
She didn't need to.
"The phone in the wipes," I said.
"Cheapest one I could find." She almost smiled.
"Figured they might search the bag."
"They did," I said.
"They went through everything."
"I know." She looked at me.
"That's why I put it in the wipes."
I laughed.
It came out strange — short and surprised, like I'd forgotten the sound of it.
Donna looked pleased.
May you like
"Eat the soup," she said.
"It's getting cold."
